The brand new Oakdale Police Department patrol car pulled into my own gas station at 8:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in mid-January with 3 inches of fresh lake effect snow on the hood, and Officer Daniel Polansky behind the wheel: 26 years old, six months out of the academy, and four days back from his Field Training Officer sign-off.
Behind him in the passenger seat sat Margaret Kilroy: 50 years old, blonde, in a turquoise parka and a pair of designer Sorel boots, holding a Stanley insulated mug and looking at me through the windshield like I was the man who had personally canceled her Christmas.
Officer Polansky got out. Margaret got out. They walked up to the pumps. Officer Polansky said: "Sir, Mrs. Kilroy here has filed a complaint that you refused service and threatened her at this station. I'm going to need to ask you a few questions."
I said: "Officer, of course. Before we start, would you do me one favor and key your shoulder radio?" "Dispatch, this is Chief Hollis."
The dispatcher's voice came back inside of two seconds—the same voice I had been hearing every Tuesday morning briefing for six years. She said: "Go ahead, Chief."
I am Wyatt Hollis: 56 years old, born in Oakdale, Michigan, Upper Peninsula, on a Tuesday in February of 1969, in the room my mother had been a teenager in, in a clapped house my grandfather Esko Hollis had built with his hands in 1948 out of milled hemlock he had paid for in fresh venison and a borrowed Plymouth flatbed.
Oakdale is a town of 3,800 people, 16 miles north of Marquette on US-41, at the corner of a hard cedar swamp and the south shore of a small bay of Lake Superior that we have been calling Hollis Cove since approximately 1953, even though the US Geological Survey on its 1962 map called it Pickerel Bay.
I have been Chief of the Oakdale Police Department since 2018. I was a detective from 2011 to 2018. I was a patrol sergeant from 2003 to 2011. I was a patrol officer from 1996 to 2003. Before that, I was a Marine Corps military police corporal in 29 Palms, California, from 1989 to 1993. Before that, I was a 15-year-old kid in Oakdale who had not yet figured out what he wanted to do with his life, and was working evenings and weekends at his father's gas station on US-41, which is called Hollis Gas and Grocery, and which my grandfather Esko opened on a Saturday in May of 1962 with a single pump, 11 cans of motor oil, and a refrigerator case full of his wife's pasties.
I inherited the station from my father, Theodore Hollis, on April 3rd, 2014, after Dad died of a heart attack on the back step of the bait cooler while restocking nightcrawlers at 6:14 a.m. on a Saturday in May.
My sister Cora, 54, manages the day-to-day operation. She lives in the upstairs apartment above the store with her husband Bryce and their three Australian Shepherds. She has been running the cash register since 1985. She knows every regular customer's name, every regular customer's order, and every regular customer's children's birthdays. She is, in the language of Upper Peninsula commerce, the most powerful private citizen of Oakdale, Michigan, and she has been since approximately 1996.
I am divorced. My ex-wife Linnea moved to Phoenix in 2009 because she could not, in her own words on the front porch of our house that February morning, "do one more winter in this godforsaken icebox while you work 100 hours a week." We did not have children. Linnea and I had agreed in 2002 that the right time would come, and we had not, in the seven years that followed, found the right time. The right time turned out to be the absence of children. She is now remarried to a podiatrist in Scottsdale. We exchange Christmas cards. She sends me photographs of her saguaros; I send her photographs of the bay.
I raised my younger brother Bobby from 1993 to 2008. Bobby is now 31 years old, runs a snowplow and handyman business out of Marquette, has a wife named Jenny and two boys, and calls me at the station every Friday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. without fail, because that is what older brothers and younger brothers do in this part of the country.
Bobby was 11 months old when our mother died of a brain aneurysm at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning in October of 1993. I was 24, and had just gotten home from the Marine Corps with an honorable discharge and a duffel of dress blues. Dad was 49, had been running the station alone since Mom's diagnosis the previous spring, and was the kind of UP man who would not have admitted he was drowning if he had been holding the rope. I told Dad on the day we buried Mom that I would stay. I told him I would help raise Bobby. I told him I would work the station with him until Bobby graduated from high school. I did all three. Bobby graduated from Marquette Senior High in May of 2008, and joined the Michigan National Guard the next month. I made patrol sergeant at the Oakdale PD a month after that. Dad lived another six years and three months. He never told me, in any of those years, that he was grateful. He did not need to. He left me the station in his will. He left Bobby $12,000 in a savings account he had been adding to since 1993.
Birch Harbor Estates is a planned community at the end of a private gravel road called Cedar Bluff Lane, 3 miles north of my gas station on the south shore of Lake Superior. The development was built in 2019 by an out-of-state developer named Camden Brothers Holdings out of Bloomfield Hills: 36 homes on 12 acres of formerly Forest Service land that Camden Brothers had bought from the State of Michigan in 2017 in a quiet sale that the township residents did not know was happening until the bulldozers arrived. The homes were marketed in Detroit and Chicago at prices ranging from $800,000 to $2.1 million. The buyers were almost all weekenders. Their license plates were almost all out-of-state.
Margaret Kilroy and her husband Daniel Kilroy bought the four-bedroom on the highest lot of Birch Harbor Estates in October of 2020 for $985,000 in cash. Daniel was a recently retired General Motors purchasing executive. Margaret had been a stay-at-home mother of two adult sons who had both moved to the West Coast and stopped returning her phone calls in approximately 2019. She was elected president of the Birch Harbor Estates Homeowners Association in March of 2022 on a platform of—in her own campaign flyer—"elevating the standard of community amenity and creating a true private resort experience for our member families."
I met Margaret Kilroy for the first time on a Saturday afternoon in May of 2022, about six weeks after her election, when she walked into the gas station in white linen pants and a turquoise quilted vest, looked at the cooler of pasties Cora had been making since 1985, looked at the deer processing schedule taped to the wall, looked at the bait cooler my father had died on the steps of, and said, with the smile of a woman who had been to charm school in the 1980s and had not learned a single thing there: "Hello, I'm Margaret Kilroy, the new president of Birch Harbor Estates. I'd like to discuss a community amenity arrangement with your station."
Cora, behind the register, did not look up from her crossword puzzle. Cora did not look up because Cora had been waiting 28 years to meet a Margaret Kilroy, and she did not want to use up the moment all at once.